9 ms·

AI used well can restore middle class jobs [pdf]

75 points by mnode 2y ago

gcheong 2y ago
Productivity has been gaining for years while the number of working hours per week have remained the same and wages have stagnated or even declined. Why should I believe more productivity on the lower end will restore the middle class?
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  Because if you do believe this, Marc Andreessen's personal net worth increases by the annual economic output of a rural Midwestern county in the next week. You're right to be skeptical. Don't believe them. Demand a greater slice of the created value for yourself, and until you get it (and it manages to have a positive impact on your finances - see inflation), tell these people to shove their whitepapers where the sun doesn't shine.
dw_arthur 2y ago
Autor was just on the Odd Lots podcast, so if you don't feel like reading the paper you can listen to the interview where he talks about it.
- ianand 2y ago
  Thanks for this. Listening to an author on a podcast is great hack for getting a good summary of a researcher’s or book author’s views. (Especially business books)
NegativeLatency 2y ago
It's an interesting point, but in our society and current economic system I have a hard time imagining it will be anything so different as to what we have now to "restore the middle class". We have people and companies with so much power that it rivals governments, and in the US we also have a large segment of the population who has been conditioned to believe that the government is bad and having less of it will make it better, but it seems to me like better government that actually supports the needs/desires of the populace at large is required to make our society better for everyone.
asdff 2y ago
The problem with the concept of a middle class job (one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations), is that it represents an unstable equilibrium state. Incentives of most businesses are the opposite of someone in the middle class. Businesses don't think in terms how they can take so little such as to perpetuate some idyllic lifestyle unimpinged, they think in terms of how much can they possibly take off the table for our own gain without bleeding the beast dry. This is why over time, middle class lifestyles get clawed away into more desperate paycheck to paycheck ones. So even if AI used well restores some middle class jobs tomorrow, what about next week lets say when companies realize they can charge more for goods and services, and people are back to paycheck to paycheck? Short of a planned economy with price controls I don't know how you prevent these incentives from emerging.
- teekert 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - asdff 2y ago
    You don't have to tell me that. You have to just out compete over a century of very successful anti union propaganda to get through to the labor in this country. Not to mention how the working class is so fractured on identity politics. No easy thing to go up against, especially when so many groups profit off the status quo as it is and will fight you every step of the way.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.asp... https://www.marketplace.org/2023/01/03/gen-z-is-the-most-pro-union-generation/ https://www.marketplace.org/2023/01/03/gen-z-is-the-most-pro...
      - asdff 2y ago
        Never underestimate capitals ability to buy votes and influence when it matters. See how uber bought prop 22. All you have to do is fill the void with enough noise and you can convince the few percent of eligible voters who actually vote to believe anything.
fny 2y ago
"air traffic controllers were paid a median annual salary of $132,250 in 2022, or nearly four times the $33,380 median annual pay of crossing guards" It's not quite "expertise" that justifies the wage gap, it's supply and demand. Almost anyone can be a crossing guard--not everyone can be an air traffic controller. If AI theoretically could make anyone an air traffic controller, one would expect the salary to collapse as well. Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes.
- bumby 2y ago
  Likewise I think the author makes the same error elsewhere. TFA states: >The contemporary challenge is the high and rising price of essential services like healthcare, higher education and law, that are monopolized by guilds of highly educated experts. The rising cost of education and healthcare are not exactly going to the "guilds of highly educated experts" as much as they are ballooned by second-order effects from an overly complicated system. For example, the higher cost of education is not going to professors as much as it's going to the administrative costs as colleges continue to compete for a growing supply of students willing to pay (in part because the mass availability of student loans allows them an extensive line of credit and also because the labor market makes it seem like they must get a degree to be competitive).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Swizec 2y ago
  > If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes We can study this by looking at examples! Slovenia (where I'm from) has the 3rd lowest gini index in the world[1]. Meaning we are the 3rd most egalitarian country in the world with close to zero income inequality. You would think this is fantastic, but in practice it means everyone's equally poor-ish. There's a lot of talent drain. Everyone in my millenial generation that's great at their job has either moved out of the country, works remotely for foreign companies, or has built a business that primarily targets foreign markets. They're starting to build a proper middle class, but there's nowhere for their money to go. There aren't enough higher middle class folk to support all the services they'd want. So the extra money goes to foreign companies or into inflated real estate that has become unaffordable to anyone employed locally. And there are no rich people to tax or ask for philanthropy to break the status quo. A net worth of ~$20mil puts you on the list of top 100 richest Slovenians as of 2023. Most of them made their money abroad and have also moved their wealth out of the country to avoid high taxation. The concept of "upwards mobility" is barely worth talking about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
xyst 2y ago
If AI truly does take over most jobs of today (low to mid tier level SWEs replaced with a couple of “prompt engineers”). I would be okay, but only if there were proper support pillars in place. Healthcare should be free for all. UBI. And of course continued education provided to train workforce into something else.
- chrishare 2y ago
  Agree, and this would require serious taxation reform in most countries.
  - ephemeral-life 2y ago
    taxation reform won't be necessary. Its just straight up unobtainable by most countries.
- azinman2 2y ago
  UBI means everyone is poor and on welfare. I don’t see why this is the ideal solution everyone points to. I guess better than everyone jobless and no net whatsoever, but I wouldn’t call it something to strive for.
  - kelseyfrog 2y ago
    I don't think we can say that without trying it.
  - dencodev 2y ago
    I guess it depends on how you define "poor". If "poor" is never having to work, getting to chase your dreams and ambitions with your entire life, and never having to worry about food and housing and healthcare, then sign me up.
d--b 2y ago
This person assumes AI is going to stay in its current form: a technology that requires an expert operator to help accomplish tasks. Most people are afraid of “next-level” AI, where no operator is required. If trucks can be moved without anyone at the wheel, truck driving is a job that won’t exist anymore. As simple as that. Whether trucks can be 100% autonomous remains to see.
- hscontinuity 2y ago
  Not if but when. 100% autonomous ability is well within reach.
  - root_axis 2y ago
    Based on what? All the evidence I see suggests there is no clear path to full autonomy. It's within the realm of possibility, but certainly not inevitable.
  - xemra 2y ago
    Hello my dear old friend, automatic car
  - d--b 2y ago
    Not in all conditions. The devil really is in the details. A truly 100% autonomous vehicle requires a much higher level of intelligence than a self driving vehicle with a driver able to take the wheel when necessary. Take the case when some work is happening on the road and workers make signs with their hands to tell you to go this or that way. But on the same road there is also someone who is dressed up as a policeman cause it’s Halloween, and he’s waving at some friends.
    - acchow 2y ago
      > Not in all conditions. The devil really is in the details. I imagine we will reach a place where fully autonomous vehicles will pull off to the side of the road in certain weather. Which I wish we could force for humans, but seems infeasible to implement.
freitzkriesler2 2y ago
Can, doesn't mean it will. Sorry, I've become very pessimistic these days. If something can be used to permanantly reduce FTEs, it will be done.
qntty 2y ago
> Because of AI’s capacity to weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making, it can be applied to enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks that are currently arrogated to elite experts, e.g., medical care to doctors, document production to lawyers, software coding to computer engineers, and undergraduate education to professors. Note that in this analysis, if you are a software engineer, you are not the "middle class" as most signs point to. Rather you are a member of an elite that the middle class must wrest power from. The identity of the middle class is another question. You might assume that it's made of the people you know, but more likely it's underpaid workers from developing countries.
sourcepluck 2y ago
Yes, let's hope that AI won't remove the need for drudgery! I knew a very comfortably well-off lady who made a fine point of how she never used the automatic machines in the supermarket, because she wanted to ensure that those poor cashiers didn't lose their jobs. How noble!
liveoneggs 2y ago
> My thesis is not a forecast but an argument about what is possible: AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the US labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization. > The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to push back against the process started by computerization Yes. More automation and computers will clearly solve the problems created by automation and computers. I can't find where he probably says something like "outsourcing of these jobs will also improve middle class outcomes" but I assume it's in there through some kind of weasel-wording.
badrunaway 2y ago
One new job which I believe will be high paying and lot of people will be able to do, in the post-AI world => Content verification and moderation. With so many bots and fake content, I don't want to waste my time on low quality stuff. I want other humans to verify it, test it, validate it etc. and then only it should see my eyes. Those platforms which will employ this approach will have better content coming to timelines and will attract more users.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  >high paying and lot of people will be able to do Generally speaking, this is an oxymoron.
  - johnea 2y ago
    This is already playing out in India and Africa as people are paid $1/day to classify training data.
    - badrunaway 2y ago
      right. I am just talking more from perspective of actual content quality measurement. Like youtube videos will explode once SORA AI becomes available for general use by OpenAI. Deepfakes and all I feel need some sort of trust driven network of humans to take a final call. I am just thinking out loud.
  - badrunaway 2y ago
    ah, thanks for pointing out.
agentultra 2y ago
Progressive social policies, better voter representation, and strong unions can restore middle class jobs.
- azinman2 2y ago
  How does that prevent costs from rising, and business staying globally competitive and thus afloat?
  - agentultra 2y ago
    There was a middle class in the US and Canada when there was better union representation and progressive social policies. That regressed when neoliberalism came into power and gutted the social institutions in favour of corporate power and the rich. Now there is almost no middle class and rising inequality. How long can this state of affairs stay afloat? Does a business require the ability to exploit workers in order to succeed and be useful?
Animats 2y ago
This seems to be the author's main point: "Recall that the advent of pre-AI computing made the expert judgment of professional decision- makers more consequential and more valuable by speeding the task of acquiring and organizing information. Simultaneously, computerization devalued and displaced the procedural expertise that was the stock-in-trade of many middle-skill workers. But imagine a technology that could invert this process: what would it look like? It would support and supplement judgment, thus enabling a larger set of non-elite workers to engage in high-stakes decision-making. It would simultaneously temper the monopoly power that doctors hold over medical care, lawyers over document production, software engineers over computer code, professors over undergraduate education, etc." "Artificial Intelligence is this inversion technology. By providing decision support in the form of real-time guidance and guardrails, AI could enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts like doctors, lawyers, coders and educators. This would improve the quality of jobs for workers without college degrees, moderate earnings inequality, and — akin to what the Industrial Revolution did for consumer goods — lower the cost of key services such as healthcare, education and legal expertise." "Moderate earnings inequality" means "fewer high-paying jobs", as someone pointed out in another comment. From where does the pressure come to raise incomes across the board? That's what unions were for. In the US, the unions were crushed. The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement, is almost forgotten. Yet that's what this paper assumes will happen. Somehow. This is "trickle-down" economics with an "AI" label pasted on it. The author has better papers. His "Why are there still so many jobs" (2014) [1] is worth a read. He makes predictions one can now check. [1] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/why%20are%20there%20still%20jobs%202014.pdf https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/w...
- thfuran 2y ago
  >The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement No, it wasn't. A company can't survive long paying all its employees more than they're worth. The goal of unions was, at least as far as pay is concerned, only to reduce the margin that was skimmed off of employee value by employers.
roughly 2y ago
Ted Chiang put it best - "most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism." https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-fears-of-capitalism https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-... So long as the dominant theology in this country is extractive capitalism, nothing that tilts the cost balance towards capital and away from labor will be good for the middle class or the average person.
johnea 2y ago
All of this analysis is based on inaccurate assumptions. Primarily that some rules of supply and demand will dictate how the tech is deployed. Let's look at history. The industrial revolution was predicted to create copious leasure time for the working class. How did that turn out? The steam engine, the cotton gin, the automobile, the computer... Every single technological advance that was predicted to improve the lives of the working class due to massive increases in productivity, was used instead to almost exclusivly bennefit ownership. This is exactly what will happen with current LLM tech (please don't call the bullshit generators "AI") If the tech cannot be deployed so as to exclusively bennefit ownership, it won't be deployed at all...
matteoraso 2y ago
It won't, and that's a good thing. Workplace deaths will plummet, people will have more free time, and the environment will improve from less people commuting. I don't see any reason why replacing certain jobs with AI is bad, so long as this is paired with UBI.
pksebben 2y ago
Everyone seems to be asking how AI is going to fit in the current paradigm - creating or destroying jobs and so forth - but I don't see a ton of folks talking about something I feel is patently obvious; that the most relevant applications of this stuff are going to exist outside the "company hire people to make product / give service and sell service" cycle. Yes, AI will lower the barrier for entry level positions (IMO a good thing; more chances for smart creative people to get in the game who may have been failed by more traditional systems). But it will also allow the creation of projects by much smaller teams, who no longer need to stress the details and have a focus on making a thing just to try it out. Individuals will be able to get much more experimental and iterate way faster; if the amount of investment to build an MVP is less than the investment to research and assess all that crap that usually has to go into a commercial product (market fit, funding, marketing, sales, etc.) then you can just make the damn thing and see if the pasta sticks to the wall. This could be a really great environment for testing out weird ideas, some of which might be completely novel and break the mold in ways that are simply not feasible if you have to manage all that other stuff. I'm also excited to see what new stuff pops into the OSS space as a result of devs-with-jobs being able to hack out a proof of concept in a couple hours and smacking some stuff together over weekends.
- 2devnull 2y ago
  “AI will lower the barrier for entry level position” No. Empirically, has it? It will do the opposite. It removes trust, therefore making existing powers more powerful. Ain’t going to democratize anything but cybercrime.
  - pksebben 2y ago
    Not sure I follow you. Do you mean that the existence of AI will undermine trust that applicants know what they're doing? It hasn't really been around long enough for an empirical analysis of effects. It's also incredibly hard to measure effects with the systems themselves being in such flux. For what it's worth, I think categorical statements of any stripe are a little premature. Even the EA folks speak in probabilistic margins.
2devnull 2y ago
The most charitable thing I can say about this is that it’s likely wrong.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Editorialised title. Actual title of PDF: "Applying AI to Rebuild Middle Class Jobs"

75 points by mnode 2y ago

Productivity has been gaining for years while the number of working hours per week have remained the same and wages have stagnated or even declined. Why should I believe more productivity on the lower end will restore the middle class?

lenerdenator 2y ago
Because if you do believe this, Marc Andreessen's personal net worth increases by the annual economic output of a rural Midwestern county in the next week. You're right to be skeptical. Don't believe them. Demand a greater slice of the created value for yourself, and until you get it (and it manages to have a positive impact on your finances - see inflation), tell these people to shove their whitepapers where the sun doesn't shine.

dw_arthur 2y ago

Autor was just on the Odd Lots podcast, so if you don't feel like reading the paper you can listen to the interview where he talks about it.

ianand 2y ago
Thanks for this. Listening to an author on a podcast is great hack for getting a good summary of a researcher’s or book author’s views. (Especially business books)

NegativeLatency 2y ago

It's an interesting point, but in our society and current economic system I have a hard time imagining it will be anything so different as to what we have now to "restore the middle class". We have people and companies with so much power that it rivals governments, and in the US we also have a large segment of the population who has been conditioned to believe that the government is bad and having less of it will make it better, but it seems to me like better government that actually supports the needs/desires of the populace at large is required to make our society better for everyone.

asdff 2y ago

The problem with the concept of a middle class job (one where you can comfortably afford living, fun, saving, etc I think is most people's interpretations), is that it represents an unstable equilibrium state. Incentives of most businesses are the opposite of someone in the middle class. Businesses don't think in terms how they can take so little such as to perpetuate some idyllic lifestyle unimpinged, they think in terms of how much can they possibly take off the table for our own gain without bleeding the beast dry. This is why over time, middle class lifestyles get clawed away into more desperate paycheck to paycheck ones. So even if AI used well restores some middle class jobs tomorrow, what about next week lets say when companies realize they can charge more for goods and services, and people are back to paycheck to paycheck? Short of a planned economy with price controls I don't know how you prevent these incentives from emerging.

teekert 2y ago
[flagged]
- asdff 2y ago
  You don't have to tell me that. You have to just out compete over a century of very successful anti union propaganda to get through to the labor in this country. Not to mention how the working class is so fractured on identity politics. No easy thing to go up against, especially when so many groups profit off the status quo as it is and will fight you every step of the way.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.asp... https://www.marketplace.org/2023/01/03/gen-z-is-the-most-pro-union-generation/ https://www.marketplace.org/2023/01/03/gen-z-is-the-most-pro...
    - asdff 2y ago
      Never underestimate capitals ability to buy votes and influence when it matters. See how uber bought prop 22. All you have to do is fill the void with enough noise and you can convince the few percent of eligible voters who actually vote to believe anything.

fny 2y ago

"air traffic controllers were paid a median annual salary of $132,250 in 2022, or nearly four times the $33,380 median annual pay of crossing guards" It's not quite "expertise" that justifies the wage gap, it's supply and demand. Almost anyone can be a crossing guard--not everyone can be an air traffic controller. If AI theoretically could make anyone an air traffic controller, one would expect the salary to collapse as well. Additionally, the notion of a middle class relies on a wage differential. If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes.

bumby 2y ago
Likewise I think the author makes the same error elsewhere. TFA states: >The contemporary challenge is the high and rising price of essential services like healthcare, higher education and law, that are monopolized by guilds of highly educated experts. The rising cost of education and healthcare are not exactly going to the "guilds of highly educated experts" as much as they are ballooned by second-order effects from an overly complicated system. For example, the higher cost of education is not going to professors as much as it's going to the administrative costs as colleges continue to compete for a growing supply of students willing to pay (in part because the mass availability of student loans allows them an extensive line of credit and also because the labor market makes it seem like they must get a degree to be competitive).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Swizec 2y ago
> If AI levels the playing field so dramatically, the notion of middle class will entirely evaporate since everyone's purchasing power equalizes We can study this by looking at examples! Slovenia (where I'm from) has the 3rd lowest gini index in the world[1]. Meaning we are the 3rd most egalitarian country in the world with close to zero income inequality. You would think this is fantastic, but in practice it means everyone's equally poor-ish. There's a lot of talent drain. Everyone in my millenial generation that's great at their job has either moved out of the country, works remotely for foreign companies, or has built a business that primarily targets foreign markets. They're starting to build a proper middle class, but there's nowhere for their money to go. There aren't enough higher middle class folk to support all the services they'd want. So the extra money goes to foreign companies or into inflated real estate that has become unaffordable to anyone employed locally. And there are no rich people to tax or ask for philanthropy to break the status quo. A net worth of ~$20mil puts you on the list of top 100 richest Slovenians as of 2023. Most of them made their money abroad and have also moved their wealth out of the country to avoid high taxation. The concept of "upwards mobility" is barely worth talking about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

xyst 2y ago

If AI truly does take over most jobs of today (low to mid tier level SWEs replaced with a couple of “prompt engineers”). I would be okay, but only if there were proper support pillars in place. Healthcare should be free for all. UBI. And of course continued education provided to train workforce into something else.

chrishare 2y ago
Agree, and this would require serious taxation reform in most countries.
- ephemeral-life 2y ago
  taxation reform won't be necessary. Its just straight up unobtainable by most countries.
azinman2 2y ago
UBI means everyone is poor and on welfare. I don’t see why this is the ideal solution everyone points to. I guess better than everyone jobless and no net whatsoever, but I wouldn’t call it something to strive for.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  I don't think we can say that without trying it.
- dencodev 2y ago
  I guess it depends on how you define "poor". If "poor" is never having to work, getting to chase your dreams and ambitions with your entire life, and never having to worry about food and housing and healthcare, then sign me up.

d--b 2y ago

This person assumes AI is going to stay in its current form: a technology that requires an expert operator to help accomplish tasks. Most people are afraid of “next-level” AI, where no operator is required. If trucks can be moved without anyone at the wheel, truck driving is a job that won’t exist anymore. As simple as that. Whether trucks can be 100% autonomous remains to see.

hscontinuity 2y ago
Not if but when. 100% autonomous ability is well within reach.
- root_axis 2y ago
  Based on what? All the evidence I see suggests there is no clear path to full autonomy. It's within the realm of possibility, but certainly not inevitable.
- xemra 2y ago
  Hello my dear old friend, automatic car
- d--b 2y ago
  Not in all conditions. The devil really is in the details. A truly 100% autonomous vehicle requires a much higher level of intelligence than a self driving vehicle with a driver able to take the wheel when necessary. Take the case when some work is happening on the road and workers make signs with their hands to tell you to go this or that way. But on the same road there is also someone who is dressed up as a policeman cause it’s Halloween, and he’s waving at some friends.
  - acchow 2y ago
    > Not in all conditions. The devil really is in the details. I imagine we will reach a place where fully autonomous vehicles will pull off to the side of the road in certain weather. Which I wish we could force for humans, but seems infeasible to implement.

freitzkriesler2 2y ago

Can, doesn't mean it will. Sorry, I've become very pessimistic these days. If something can be used to permanantly reduce FTEs, it will be done.

qntty 2y ago

> Because of AI’s capacity to weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making, it can be applied to enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks that are currently arrogated to elite experts, e.g., medical care to doctors, document production to lawyers, software coding to computer engineers, and undergraduate education to professors. Note that in this analysis, if you are a software engineer, you are not the "middle class" as most signs point to. Rather you are a member of an elite that the middle class must wrest power from. The identity of the middle class is another question. You might assume that it's made of the people you know, but more likely it's underpaid workers from developing countries.

sourcepluck 2y ago

Yes, let's hope that AI won't remove the need for drudgery! I knew a very comfortably well-off lady who made a fine point of how she never used the automatic machines in the supermarket, because she wanted to ensure that those poor cashiers didn't lose their jobs. How noble!

liveoneggs 2y ago

> My thesis is not a forecast but an argument about what is possible: AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the US labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization. > The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to push back against the process started by computerization Yes. More automation and computers will clearly solve the problems created by automation and computers. I can't find where he probably says something like "outsourcing of these jobs will also improve middle class outcomes" but I assume it's in there through some kind of weasel-wording.

badrunaway 2y ago

One new job which I believe will be high paying and lot of people will be able to do, in the post-AI world => Content verification and moderation. With so many bots and fake content, I don't want to waste my time on low quality stuff. I want other humans to verify it, test it, validate it etc. and then only it should see my eyes. Those platforms which will employ this approach will have better content coming to timelines and will attract more users.

Workaccount2 2y ago
>high paying and lot of people will be able to do Generally speaking, this is an oxymoron.
- johnea 2y ago
  This is already playing out in India and Africa as people are paid $1/day to classify training data.
  - badrunaway 2y ago
    right. I am just talking more from perspective of actual content quality measurement. Like youtube videos will explode once SORA AI becomes available for general use by OpenAI. Deepfakes and all I feel need some sort of trust driven network of humans to take a final call. I am just thinking out loud.
- badrunaway 2y ago
  ah, thanks for pointing out.

agentultra 2y ago

Progressive social policies, better voter representation, and strong unions can restore middle class jobs.

azinman2 2y ago
How does that prevent costs from rising, and business staying globally competitive and thus afloat?
- agentultra 2y ago
  There was a middle class in the US and Canada when there was better union representation and progressive social policies. That regressed when neoliberalism came into power and gutted the social institutions in favour of corporate power and the rich. Now there is almost no middle class and rising inequality. How long can this state of affairs stay afloat? Does a business require the ability to exploit workers in order to succeed and be useful?

Animats 2y ago

This seems to be the author's main point: "Recall that the advent of pre-AI computing made the expert judgment of professional decision- makers more consequential and more valuable by speeding the task of acquiring and organizing information. Simultaneously, computerization devalued and displaced the procedural expertise that was the stock-in-trade of many middle-skill workers. But imagine a technology that could invert this process: what would it look like? It would support and supplement judgment, thus enabling a larger set of non-elite workers to engage in high-stakes decision-making. It would simultaneously temper the monopoly power that doctors hold over medical care, lawyers over document production, software engineers over computer code, professors over undergraduate education, etc." "Artificial Intelligence is this inversion technology. By providing decision support in the form of real-time guidance and guardrails, AI could enable a larger set of workers possessing complementary knowledge to perform some of the higher-stakes decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts like doctors, lawyers, coders and educators. This would improve the quality of jobs for workers without college degrees, moderate earnings inequality, and — akin to what the Industrial Revolution did for consumer goods — lower the cost of key services such as healthcare, education and legal expertise." "Moderate earnings inequality" means "fewer high-paying jobs", as someone pointed out in another comment. From where does the pressure come to raise incomes across the board? That's what unions were for. In the US, the unions were crushed. The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement, is almost forgotten. Yet that's what this paper assumes will happen. Somehow. This is "trickle-down" economics with an "AI" label pasted on it. The author has better papers. His "Why are there still so many jobs" (2014) [1] is worth a read. He makes predictions one can now check. [1] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/why%20are%20there%20still%20jobs%202014.pdf https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/w...

thfuran 2y ago
>The whole idea of paying people more than they are worth as an economic unit, a key goal of the union movement No, it wasn't. A company can't survive long paying all its employees more than they're worth. The goal of unions was, at least as far as pay is concerned, only to reduce the margin that was skimmed off of employee value by employers.

roughly 2y ago

Ted Chiang put it best - "most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism." https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-fears-of-capitalism https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-... So long as the dominant theology in this country is extractive capitalism, nothing that tilts the cost balance towards capital and away from labor will be good for the middle class or the average person.

johnea 2y ago

All of this analysis is based on inaccurate assumptions. Primarily that some rules of supply and demand will dictate how the tech is deployed. Let's look at history. The industrial revolution was predicted to create copious leasure time for the working class. How did that turn out? The steam engine, the cotton gin, the automobile, the computer... Every single technological advance that was predicted to improve the lives of the working class due to massive increases in productivity, was used instead to almost exclusivly bennefit ownership. This is exactly what will happen with current LLM tech (please don't call the bullshit generators "AI") If the tech cannot be deployed so as to exclusively bennefit ownership, it won't be deployed at all...

matteoraso 2y ago

It won't, and that's a good thing. Workplace deaths will plummet, people will have more free time, and the environment will improve from less people commuting. I don't see any reason why replacing certain jobs with AI is bad, so long as this is paired with UBI.

pksebben 2y ago

Everyone seems to be asking how AI is going to fit in the current paradigm - creating or destroying jobs and so forth - but I don't see a ton of folks talking about something I feel is patently obvious; that the most relevant applications of this stuff are going to exist outside the "company hire people to make product / give service and sell service" cycle. Yes, AI will lower the barrier for entry level positions (IMO a good thing; more chances for smart creative people to get in the game who may have been failed by more traditional systems). But it will also allow the creation of projects by much smaller teams, who no longer need to stress the details and have a focus on making a thing just to try it out. Individuals will be able to get much more experimental and iterate way faster; if the amount of investment to build an MVP is less than the investment to research and assess all that crap that usually has to go into a commercial product (market fit, funding, marketing, sales, etc.) then you can just make the damn thing and see if the pasta sticks to the wall. This could be a really great environment for testing out weird ideas, some of which might be completely novel and break the mold in ways that are simply not feasible if you have to manage all that other stuff. I'm also excited to see what new stuff pops into the OSS space as a result of devs-with-jobs being able to hack out a proof of concept in a couple hours and smacking some stuff together over weekends.

2devnull 2y ago
“AI will lower the barrier for entry level position” No. Empirically, has it? It will do the opposite. It removes trust, therefore making existing powers more powerful. Ain’t going to democratize anything but cybercrime.
- pksebben 2y ago
  Not sure I follow you. Do you mean that the existence of AI will undermine trust that applicants know what they're doing? It hasn't really been around long enough for an empirical analysis of effects. It's also incredibly hard to measure effects with the systems themselves being in such flux. For what it's worth, I think categorical statements of any stripe are a little premature. Even the EA folks speak in probabilistic margins.

2devnull 2y ago

The most charitable thing I can say about this is that it’s likely wrong.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Editorialised title. Actual title of PDF: "Applying AI to Rebuild Middle Class Jobs"